With his newest film, "Crazy Heart," Jeff Bridges has critics beating the drums for an Oscar nomination, which would be his fifth. What's got everyone excited is his restrained, vanity-free performance as an alcoholic former country-western star, Bad Blake, who's reduced to playing bowling alleys with pickup bands, his only companions a bottle of whiskey, his guitar and truck, and a succession of middle-aged groupies. And then he meets a journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who helps him clean up his act.

Q:T Bone Burnett (musician, producer) says this started on the set of "Heaven's Gate," 30 years ago.

A: That's true. That's where T Bone and I met, as well as Stephen Bruton, who's an old friend of T Bone's. I also met (Kris) Kristofferson, who was a role model for this character. And he brought all of his musician friends to "Heaven's Gate," so that was six months of jamming with these guys every night after work. All of those years between then and now, we kept our friendship up. When this script came across my path initially, I turned it down, because while the script was fine, there was no music attached to it, so it was missing an essential piece. And then I ran into T Bone somewhere, and he was saying, "Did you ever hear about this script 'Crazy Heart'?" And I said, "Yeah, why, are you interested in doing it?" And he said, "I'll do it if you do it." And I said, "I'll do it if you do it." So then the missing piece appeared.

Q:You had to set aside your own performance style to play the character.

A: What I do for any role is I look inside myself, think about aspects of myself that I must use. I've written country tunes and I like to sing, those kinds of things, so I used that. But you're right, Bad doesn't perform exactly like me, so I look to other role models like Kris and Waylon (Jennings). My biggest role model was Stephen Bruton, who the film was dedicated to and who died shortly after the film was completed. He was with me every step of the way, giving me instructions on how to play the guitar, how to perform, and also what it's like to lead that kind of life. Bad's life parallels Stephen's own life. He would drive himself to gigs, and he had problems with booze and substances and all that, so he was a wonderful touchstone for me.

Q:The performance is pretty vanity free. You're not too concerned about how you look.

A: There's a certain amount of vanity in that. Vanity is caring how you appear. That caring manifests itself in looking bad. That would be the most effective way of making that character look good. See what I mean?

Q:It took me awhile to realize your character is half in the bag the whole film. Other actors would have been a little more showy about being loaded.

A: Guys who drink so often are pretty good at it. It's not a matter of knowing. They're like that all the time. They're used to being that way, and it's no big deal.

Q:And the Oscar talk. What is your attitude toward that?

A: To be getting the "Attaboy!" is a wonderful feeling. And also another aspect of it is bringing attention to this movie that I'm very proud of.

Q:I was looking at a list of films you supposedly turned down, like Indiana Jones. These are films you were offered and decided it was a direction you didn't want to take?

A: Yeah, I've heard that. It must be on the Internet. I don't remember turning any of those things down.

Q:The upside of that is that you've had a longer career than someone who had done those kinds of roles.

A: Yeah. One of the things I learned from my father (Lloyd Bridges) just from observing the frustration that he got from developing a strong persona from a TV show ("Sea Hunt"), he pulled that off so well that people thought he was a skin diver. He only got scripts for skin divers. He was a classically trained actor, a very versatile guy. That's something I really worked for, not to develop a persona, for a couple of reasons. One, it keeps it interesting for me. And hopefully it's easier for the audience to project a character on me without bringing the last time they saw me. And also for filmmakers, that I can play all kinds of parts.